Remember that Cindarella girl? Sitting in the ashes, taking only the crumbs and cast-offs that others have left…. Menial tasks, undervalued, invalidated, unappreciated? Is any of this your life?

C’mon, think about it, REALLY. When was the last time you got a new top that your teenage daughter hasn’t appropriated? Do you serve the rest of your family first and take only what’s left – with a wan smile and a righteous sense of ennoblement? How often do you have the time to do what you want for YOU?

I recently read an article that was using many of our favorite fairy tales (Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, Rapunzel) to illustrate the concept of the disempowered feminine, awaiting her empowerment/awakening through the recognition and merger with the Divine Masculine. This is an interesting idea, but it got me thinking. What was the message that I got from those stories?

The archetype of the long-suffering, trapped and victimized woman has been the story that many women I know have been running unconsciously for centuries. The message I got was that sacrifice, poverty, servitude, and martyrdom were the Divine qualities of the feminine that honed our humility and integrity, that gave us a sad, yet righteous nobility – our path to God. And I accepted this as my lot. This was my mother, this was the saints, and this was Mother Theresa. Those who sacrifice all, asking nothing for themselves has been held up to me as an ideal, yet, in my observation, this type of behavior just gets you walked on. How often has this worked for you?

Those of us who unconsciously run this program are actually setting up their lives to have an experience of lack, invalidation, limitation, entrapment, victimization, disempowerment, etc. Is this attractive? I want to know, what handsome prince, in his power and enlightenment would want a partner by his side who is such a drag? How do we get from victim to Queen from there? I think there is a big piece of the puzzle missing.

Some of that information has been provided recently in some wonderful re-makes of the Cinderella story, in “Ella Enchanted” with Anne Hathaway and “Ever After” with Drew Barrymore. Here we have two feisty, intelligent and powerful women, who despite the fact that circumstances have them at a certain disadvantage, through their natural gifts of wit and wisdom, attract the Prince and shift their experience to love and prosperity – dreams come true. This is a good beginning, however, as I said there is still a big piece missing. How/why did this being have to experience the “fall from grace,” – to lose her sense of empowerment and Divinity – to get to the experience wherein she found her fulfillment in her merger with the Masculine?

We know that the appreciation of duality and our perception are what defines our experience. One might argue, that the experience of “the fall” is a necessary spiritual educational tool to awaken deeper compassion and unconditional love. I have noticed that I have experienced a major sense of pleasure, enjoyment and caring, as I open myself to more deeply explore and appreciate a greater breadth of awareness and reverence of all experience.

I have a few problems still left, too. This is another picture of a paradigm, that promises us bliss beyond the pain we have experienced. Pain and suffering have been an integral part of recorded history. The concept of heaven has been promised somewhere, sometime, as a carrot dangling in front of our noses… and since of recorded time, we have sought it as if it is a reality that exists somewhere, although who has really seen it that you know of? We persist in this belief, the undercurrent motivating all of our response/reaction to life. Is this a program too, whose time of usefulness has come or gone? Or is this a harbinger, a message from the future reminding us of the birthright that only we can invoke and create from our NOW?

In each and every moment, we have a decision to make; do we have what it takes to climb Mount Everest and stand up for ourselves, our truth and our needs (sometimes it feels like that), or shrink back into the shadows and the cinders, disavowing our Divinity and hiding behind a victim mentality. The choice is yours. Sometimes you will be able to step up and sometimes you won’t. It is okay, you’ll always have another opportunity!

Copyright 2006 SHAMANESQUE ENTERPRISES

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